Joe McNally Photography

That’s how it goes, right? Or is it mad badgers and Englishmen? Mad dogs? Can’t remember, but that’s okay, cause Drew Gardner reminds us in his lighting video. Lessee, this video is about location selection, apparently dead fashion models, trees, tractors, Elinchrom Rangers, booms, C-stands, makeup artists, live badgers, animal trainers, fences, lighting theory and diagrams, water buffalo with naked women atop them, smoke machines, smoke wafting, backlighting, sidelighting, mood lighting, post production, and of course, the ring master who can control the action in all three rings of the bigtop of his brain, the aforementioned mad Englishman, Drew Gardner. Check out this teaser. Drew keeps his clothes on (thank you!), the model gets a bit naked.

Drew is a piece of work, as anyone who has encountered him knows. He’s got one of those singularly crazy sensibilities behind the camera that always pushes the envelope of what is possible. Thing is, he has always got a destination in mind, which is great, especially for somebody who likes a story line. He links these pix into a narrative. An admittedly hazy, madcap narrative, but a narrative nevertheless. Witness his epic fashion shoots with fashion models in 6 inch stilettos impossibly outrunning heavily armed Russian special forces troops. There’s a bunch of these. Makes me wonder what eventually happens? Stay tuned! Are they caught and brought back to a nasty prison for the outrageously overdressed? Do the SWAT guys propose marriage on the spot? Or do the young ladies turn on their pursuers and start wielding their Manolo Blahnicks as fearsome, unusual weapons, ala Go Go Yubari and her chain mace ball of death in Kill Bill, Part I? I want to know! Drew, next installment please!

This installment is a load of fun and information, and pushes Drew further down the road of his ongoing forest adventures, which are already notable, and involve, as always, fairies, nymphs, real animals, animals from story books, exquisite staging and styling, a Phase One back and a smoke machine.

Ahh, the smoke machine. Drew has not got your garden variety, take it out of the closet every Halloween and see if it works type smoker you can buy at Partytime for $19.99. No, no. He has got a state of the art, industrial strength, planet Dagobah type smoker. Think LA on a bad day, and you’ve roughly got what the forest looks like after Drew gets done with it.

Check out the video, and Drew’s website. Quite mad, indeed. More tk…..

Knocked around the city last week with a great group of folks. Been a long time since I’ve done that, picking up a camera and wandering the streets of the city, looking for pictures. Truth be told, I’m not much of a street shooter. I’ve always needed the box of an assignment, a destination for the pictures, and some sort of narrative in my head, however hazy, that directs my efforts. But last week, out on the avenues, the boardwalks and the eateries of Manhattan and Brooklyn, it was fun.

We freelanced it a great deal. Bogging down on the lower East Side, with a guide who seemed absolutely pre-occupied with telling us why a building might have been important 100 years ago (all valid information, just not to us, cameras in hand, index fingers twitching in sync with our focus eyes, desperate for a lively frame of street life). We dismissed her and I headed us into Katz’s Deli on Houston, a place I have always had good luck shooting. Thankfully, some things don’t change, and we were welcomed.

This gentleman was checking the food tickets at Katz’s, and one of our group, Lex, had misplaced her’s. He went by the rules, not allowing her to leave, until she found the ticket. Sensing Lex’s immediate future might involve washing dishes, I looked over at the guy, and told him he reminded me of Hollywood actor Delroy Lindo, which was the truth. He relaxed a bit. I then told him that if I had an assignment to photograph my 10 most favorite, interesting faces in Hollywood, Lindo would be on my list. In lieu of getting such a job, I asked if I could take his picture. While all this was going on, Lex found her ticket.

We went out to Nathan’s on Coney Island, a place with hot dogs of such stature that the very sizable fish just plucked from the ocean will have to wait.

Closing time on the the Boardwalk. Closing time for Coney Island as we know it may be coming soon with the advent of new developments.

All in all….fun on the street.

Lessee…onto my own personal area of expertise–computer technology. This is a strength I share with my bud, Moose Peterson. We are down right now in the Outer Banks, on another DLWS adventure. He recently blogged his method of organizing files. Very cool. Good, straightforward, essential, completely boring information.

He knows all that, but it is his lot in life to explain stuff like this to folk like me, who are organizationally challenged. I have written right here in this blog that Moose is a walking, talking main frame who can accomplish more in a one hour concentrated burst of energy than I can in, say, a week. I daydream. I look up movie quotes. I stare at pictures of Annie. I make coffee. I nap.

But Moose’s folder blog really lit a fire under me. I thought, hell, I can do that. I use Aperture, a really elegant, versatile program. Just gotta figure out topics, and general headings, and load my stuff into those respective folders. Piece of cake.

This just about covers it. I feel better. I can really find stuff now…..more tk……

In the summer of l976, a youthful goofball named Mark Fidrych blew fastballs past just about everybody with a bat in their hands on the way to a 19-9 record, a 2.34 ERA, and the Rookie of the Year award. America’s pastime grew more and more fun with each start, as the Detroit youngster with a ball cap stuffed onto the hay bale of hair on his head threw strikes, talked to the ball and skipped about the mound like a three year old in an FAO Schwartz.

He was having fun, and so were we. Then he blew out his arm. Tried a comeback or two, but the zip was gone, and hitters he once had in a trance were jumping on his stuff. As fast as he hit the national radar screen, he was gone, a rueful footnote. Dang, Mark. That sucked. It woulda been so much fun watching you pitch for a few more years. (I woulda loved to shoot him pitching, but SI never gave me that duty, knowing full well I can’t shoot anything moving faster than tree sap in the wintertime.)

One of SI’s big sellers every year is the “Where Are They Now?” issue. Where do all these big time athletes go? What is their life after the diamond, the field, the court, the rink?

Some years had passed, so Bird qualified for a “where are they now” treatment. The Bird was back on the radar. SI was wondering where he had flown. The editors conferred. “Hmmmm. Who do we send to take pictures of this zany, eccentric chatterbox of a former athlete who still seems to live in a fantasy world?”

The first time I met up with Mark, he was making a go of it as gentleman pig farmer just outside of Boston. He approached me and the story carefully, as one would who had the experience of the world’s media pounding on his door and screaming for his time and then blowing away like yesterday’s newspaper. He had learned the hard lessons of fame, and exactly how ephemeral all that bullshit really is. So we took it a step at a time.

But he warmed up. Didn’t take long. Mark was such a bubbling life force that he couldn’t hold himself back from engaging. Remember, he used to talk to the frikkin’ baseball on national TV. Reserved is not the adjective for Mark, at least for long.

We talked, we laughed. I got on my knees into a bunch of pig shit to shoot him. A neighbor’s youngster watching the whole deal called him a buckethead. I agreed. Then he called me that, too. Again, I agreed. A pair of bucketheads, out there in the mud.

More years passed. Once again, SI wanted to know about the Bird, and wanted to know big time, like, you know, cover story. “Lessee, Fidrych is still a nut job, right? McNally available?”

This time I went back out there at the behest of my dear friend Mo Grise, now Mo Cavanaugh. Jesus, I miss Mo at the other end of the line. As an editor, she was that wonderful blend of empathy, enthusiasm, love of photography and the engagement of people that making good pictures requires. She’s a mother of two now, with a third on the way, and I daresay, she left the picture game at SI just about the right time. We went up to Massachusetts together, to meet the Bird, along with another feathered creature, Sesame Street’s Big Bird.

Days like that are the reason I have been a shooter for 30 years. Dreams of more days like this are the reason I remain a shooter. Met Mark again, and we just smiled. One more time around the block. Pair of goofballs, out there now with a yellow, nine foot, talking bird.

I also rented some baby chicks, which Mo had a helluva time wrangling, cute as they were. Little suckers are apt to go anywhere. I put the tiny darlings all over Bird, and he got down in grass and played with ‘em just like, you know, a kid.

Lost the cover. Lost it to a grouping of the very first iteration of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. (I was shooting for SI, you may remember.) I’ve lost so many covers in my career, I don’t even think about ‘em. But this one stung, mostly cause, once again, Bird had ventured. He played the game, opened his door, and his heart, and didn’t get the cover. I felt bad in the way a field person does, that way that a NY managing editor with a regular table at Elaine’s can never know about. You make a bridge, right? You connect. You push a little, prod a touch, and do your job. You come back with pictures, and, on those best of days, something that remains in your heart. A good feeling. Maybe, even, a friend. You never, never promise anything, cause you know how it goes once you drop those pictures into the giant maw of a powerful weekly magazine.

But the promise is there, nonetheless, hanging in the air, the elephant in the corner everybody tries to ignore while they continue pleasant conversation. The cover. Hope I get it. Not for me. Really wanted it for him.

It went away. The story ran, and it was a good story, and by NY publishing calculus, everything was cool. “Hey, he got ink! Who’s he to complain? Story ran, he should feel lucky.”

Yeah, I guess.

It was a good story. One paragraph….

“To feed the hungry furnace of his mortgage, for instance, he now works as an independent subcontractor, laying sewer pipe and doing road repair with the aid of a 10-wheel Mack dump truck he bought in 1986 for $88,000. “The truck has kept the fahm goin’ and kept my life goin,” he says.  The other day, though, on a road repair job at afternoon drive time, he accidentally dug into a water main that had been mismarked on the macadam.  Which is how Fidrych–perhaps the most famous man in America during its bicentennial summer–found himself standing, forlornly, in the slapstick spray of God’s seltzer bottle. “I don’t know if you evah seen a broken watah main,” he says. “but 100 pounds of pressure through an eight-inch opening, that ain’t no small thing.” No, Indeed, and thus there appeared a geysah ovah Woostah.”

Now he’s gone, killed underneath that damn dump truck. I won’t go to see the Bird again, for another of our ten year reunions.

We had a prop jersey for the shoot. He signed it for me, and I have it framed. He simply said, “To Joe….what it is… Bird.”

Mark was what he was, at every moment. He threw a fast ball right into our hearts, and we loved him for it. Like Peter Pan, he always seemed suspended by wires, floating through a daydream of a life. I’m sure there were dark times, moments and memories. That was never shared with me. The Bird I knew, just a little, was a big kid with a big heart, a cartoon character with a Boston accent, and a slightly, wonderfully cockeyed view of life around him.

The last picture I made of him that day was the Bird walking with the Big Bird, over the hill, and through the grass. Laughing and chattering, as birds do.

Farewell, Mark. Godspeed. What a flight it was…….more tk…..

Check it out……Zack Arias posted a group shot done in a dark theater with like 30 subjects with one Speed light.

So the pressure was on, as he relates. Nothing like shooting a group shot of a bunch of other shooters, fer chrissakes. Especially, you know, you’ve got Chase Jarvis, Cliff Mautner, David Nightingale, and assorted photo luminaries in the shoot. I mean, people who know what they’re doing. And of course, you’ve got David Hobby and Chris Hurtt floating around, telling Zack, you know, hey man, “It’s reaaallllly dark in here. Like f-nothin’, man! Whaddaya you gonna do? You’re screwed!”

And DH had a pocket wizard in his pocket, dialed into Zack’s channel, you know, just to really mess with him. (He didn’t, ultimately. He showed mercy to Zack, who was on stage with his camera and tripod doing a pretty good imitation of Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.)

The shot’s amazing. It definitely falls into the “Holy Shit” category for me, cause I saw it done and I was like, dude, you know, this is kinda out there….But man, he nailed to the wall. Plus, everybody looks good! There’s the deal. Tough shot, tough spot, knocks it back. Nice job, Zack….

Actually took the weekend off. Saw family, hung with Annie. Behind with the blog a bit. On another plane now, heading for Tampa to see my buds in the Kelby Clan. Scott, RC and the gang are really rubbing off on me. In the last two weeks I actually bought an Iphone, and opened up a Facebook account! I might even start tweetering, or whatever that is called. As I pointed out in my first post there, that’s something I could do in between tooting. So, that might end up being a fairly frequent activity for me. Who knows. Mongo meets technology. Dropped an f-bomb on my first post too, just to get it out of the way. I’m from NY, you know, so saying fuck is kind of like clearing your throat. My language will probably get worse this year too, cause I’m taking Jay Maisel’s NY workshop down at the bank. Looking forward to being eviscerated in the unique and wonderful way Jay can do that. He’s so smart, and funny, and keen eyed, and steeped in the world of pictures…I can’t wait.

Anyway, got a couple posts coming that should be fun. Gonna concentrate on camera work for a bit, cause there’s still so much to learn. When I was at GPP, I went back to the desert. I had gone out there last year, and it basically kicked my ass. I was experimenting, fooling around really, which is really the core of what I do, and, while I learned some stuff, when I came back, I really felt most of my pics were about as dry as the sand I was standing on. Also, in one instance, I felt I had failed a dancer, which I hate to do, cause they work so hard.

The dancer in question was the lovely Alessia. Did okay pix of her last year, mostly due to her expressiveness, but I’m nothing if not tenacious, so I went back this year and shot this with her.

It’s overwhelming out there in the sea of sand. You cruise through it, and look, that’s wild, but how about over there? That’s cool, too. Maybe keep going and see what’s over this ridge? More desert. This year, I stood for a minute and did a 360 and was like, that’s nice, okay, that looks awesome over there, and yowza that’s great, but hey, didn’t I just see that dune? Like an endless bolt of rumpled fabric, the dunes fold into each other with no starting or stopping point. I started to realize just how dismaying it would be if instead of having a couple of Land Cruisers waiting for me, I was out there by myself and I looked down at my hands and instead of seeing them holding a D3, they were holding an empty canteen. It’s wild, endless, and relentless.  Put something down, and a few minutes later, it’s gone. The desert rolls on and on, and if you stayed still for a bit, it would roll right over you.

That’s what it did last year. When that happens, man, it makes for a long plane flight home. When it comes to missed pix, I’m not exactly a water under the bridge, yesterday’s news, turn the page kinda guy. I dwell, ya know? Brood, even. Ruminate. And then try it again. I have a history of doing this type of thing. On a LIFE assignment, I lost a whole camera rig–motor driven Mamiya Pro II, 50mm lens, the whole deal, in the Great Salt Lake. If you were gonna choose a lake to drop a camera in, that’s not the one. It was February to boot. Freezing. Ice everywhere. Tripod leg slides off a rock, and the whole thing pitches into the drink. I remember turning to my assistant, the reporter, and my subject with a tight, unamused grin and said, “This could hardly be construed as positive.”

We folded our tents, and got out of the cold, and kind of just in time. But went back the next day, to the same spot, and got a cool portrait of the naturalist writer, Terry Tempest Williams.

So, true to form, I went back again this year, to a vastly different climate. Did some pictures I’m happy with, and I’ll blog some tk. But it felt good, you know, cause I just wanted to see if I could figure out what misfired out there in my head. It’s an ongoing question, right? You’re a photographer, so the first thing you do every morning is walk into the bathroom and stare at the mirror and put a big L on your forehead. Why didn’t it work yesterday? Will it happen again tomorrow? Probably. Maybe. It’s like quicksilver this thing we do. Can’t ever quite grab it and put it in your pocket, patting that pocket comfortably, knowing on this day we got, it’s right there, next to my car keys. My old high school basketball coach used to refer to a really quick, hard to defend player as being “tougher to catch than a fart in a bag.”

Good pictures are like that. Tough to catch. Hard to hold. Probably just as well. If we ever got our mitts on the real reason this whole thing occasionally works, we’d probably play with it, shake it, turn it upside down, and ultimately break it. Best to let it go, and keep chasing it. More fun that way….more tk…..

Man, does Donald have a face made for a D3X….

Shot at 1/4 at f8, D3X and the new Nikkor 50mm 1.4. Long time since I used a 50, and this thing is sharp, sharp. SB900 off to camera right, Tri-grip diffuser, 5 minute portrait session. Aperture priority at minus 2 EV, no comp dialed into the flash. The 900 has the dome diffuser off, and is zoomed to 200mm, which gives it a little punch and gets it under the brim of cowboy hat. Donald remains one of my favorite people. We were talking about women yesterday (What else is there to talk about, except photo gear, and then only for a couple of minutes. Then we go back to discussing women.) He and his honey spin on the dance floor every Friday night in downtown Santa Fe. I have a standing invite for dinner over at their place, and I’m gonna take him up on it this summer.

We were talking about how much our women mean to us, and how having one special woman in your life makes it all worth it. Though he did say, his eyes twinkling, “Joe, if the Lord ever invents anything better than women, I’ll take a dozen.”

Speaking of women, let’s talk women with cameras for a moment. (Now here’s a great discussion, right? Women and gear in the same sentence. Yikes! My wife works for Nikon and is a terrific shooter, and knows the gear and tech side of things as well as anybody. I always tell Annie I knew she was the right woman for me the first time I ever went into her refrigerator and the butter compartment had no butter but was filled with AA batteries. That’s the girl for me!)

Stacy Pearsall is a truly talented shooter who was military photographer of the year twice (first woman ever to do it) and is being featured now on Oprah. She is retired from active duty, and has taken over the directorship of the Charleston Center for Photography.

She is married to another great shooter, combat cameraman Andy Dunaway. Check out their work and their site. Between the two of them, they have, I think, about 5 or 6 Iraq tours, in addition to previous conflicts. As is common with military shooters, they are versatile, adaptable, and come back with coherent, story telling, beautiful imagery out of situations most of us wouldn’t even lift our heads up to look at. (If we did, we’d be looking for an exit.) Speaking of versatility, a few years ago Andy, went from combat camera to Washington DC for a stint as Rumsfeld’s photog, where he applied his skills tailing the former Defense Sec.

Annie and I are working on teaching together down at the Center this spring. It’ll be good to see them both. More tk….